I purchased a set of books that includes the Works of Charles Dickens. Unfortunately it comes as one mammoth sized book. I've uploaded it to my Sony 505 (actually I put it on a memory stick), but each time I go to open it my 505 goes into formating mode and stays that way for about 10 minutes. After that it just reboots.

Does anyone have any suggestions for how I may be able to break the book up into its individual books?

Has anyone run into this type of behaviour before?

AnemicOak

09-29-2009, 01:38 PM

Does anyone have any suggestions for how I may be able to break the book up into its individual books?

No suggestions on splitting it really other than Calibre might be able to convert it to another format you can work with and re-convert. (I think someone said it converts from LRF now)

You might want to just download HarryT's versions from here on MR and be done with it. They're free and he's done a nice job on them.

ccowie

09-29-2009, 05:45 PM

Thanks for the suggestion. That's likely what I will do.

Is there no way to separate bundled books? I have some others. They do work fine, but I'd rather have them separate if possible. For instance I purchased Blue Mars and the Martians by Kim Stanley Robinson. They came bundled from the Sony Store.

AnemicOak

09-29-2009, 05:57 PM

If it's an LRF (not LRX) then the only way I know of would be getting it out of that format either with Calibre (if it'll do it), LRF Tools or the ABC Amber LRF converter (which doesn't work well) and setting up your individual books from there. If you can get it into RTF, Word, HTML or a few other formats you could make individual books in Book Designer. However unless there's something special about the version you bought it's an awful lot of work when Harry's illustrated versions are there ready to download.

If it's LRX (meaning you bought it from Sony) then I'd try and get a refund since they shouldn't be selling it if it doesn't work. LRX is DRM'd and can't be converted or edited.

Does the book open ok in the Sony desktop software?

Are you dragging and dropping or using Sony's software to add the book? The Sony software will pre-paginate the book so you shouldn't get the 'formatting' message if you do it that way. Maybe the Reader just doesn't have enough horsepower to paginate a book that large.

Patricia

09-29-2009, 07:11 PM

Anemic Oak has a good point: transferring via the Sony Ebook Library may well sort out your problem because it will do the pagination on your computer, rather than on the reader. The page turns are also likely to be faster.
Incidentally, you may well find that HarryT's Dickens editions in the MR library are rather better than the Sony versions.

WT Sharpe

09-29-2009, 09:07 PM

My Dickens is too big!

I apologize for going a bit off topic, but the title of this thread reminded me of something that happened many years ago.

The subject of bigness came up one day during a break in a class I was taking I was taking at the time. You know how these things go; one fellow says his is bigger, the other claiming the contrary. Well, this guy kept insisting that his was bigger than mine, so I finally said, "Prove it. Let's both whip 'em out and compare and let these good people be the judge. So we both unbuckled our belts and slipped them off. Then we held them up side by side, and sure enough -- mine was bigger.

Don't know why half the women ran out the room before we finished. Sure, we were arguing, but we certainly weren't going fight over something as trivial as belt size.

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More on topic: how many books do you have already stored in your reader's memory? You may want to delete some of them before you try re-loading your Dickens. Or perhaps a larger capacity memory stick is the answer.

ccowie

09-30-2009, 10:03 AM

Thanks WT.

Being that you're a descendent of the nephilim I won't be proposing any such contests!

I'm storing my Dickens on an 8gig memory stick and only currently using about 100meg so that shouldn't be a problem. I did run into this problem with another very large book one time. I deleted and reloaded it a few times and eventually it formated properly. But, it's time consuming and just a pain.

HarryT

10-03-2009, 06:34 AM

The freebie Sony versions of Dickens are based on the PG sources which are, frankly, awful (eg "The Old Curiosity Shop", to take one random example, is missing two complete double pages of text, not to mention thousands of less serious errors).

I have spent the last two years thoroughly proof-reading the complete works of Dickens that I've created for MR. I'm currently about half way through the task; it'll be finished in another two or three years.

All the Dickens books you'll find here at MR are much better than the Sony ones, and the properly proof-read ones (the notes for each one will say whether or not it's been proofed yet) are as near to "perfect" as I can manage.